THE LANGUAGE OF THE COVID-19 VIRUS AND ITS VARIOUS PHENOMENOLOGY

Our daily pandemic situation is continually traversed by different languages that try to tell us about the risk that we are going through. In this circumstance, this paper focuses on the interference between medical and mass media languages and tries to show how the difficult combination of two semiotics, which are often mutually untranslatable, does not allow for an easy interpretation of reality. Every one of us, as ordinary citizens, find it hard to navigate between statistics and care messages, with all the consequences for the real functioning of the social machine. Locked in our individual “information bubble,” we fragmentarily access a complex daily newsletter in which the otherwise invisible virus returns us to our fragility. This alternating information has led to a declassification of our value orders, which often implies an authentic social psychosis, with a progressive dematerialization of life, which is countered by a new plague with many concrete implications. To choose where to place ourselves, in this new horizon, it will be necessary to act on a communicative level, and return to a less ambiguous and oscillating narrative dimension.